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Comment Re:Bejesus - Beer and Circuses (Score 2) 44

If society is so fucked, you fantasise about dropping out and breaking it

uh, it's a fucking videogame bro. it's fun to play because it's fun to do things you generally are not allowed or able to experience in real life - even if it's a very distance simulation of it - be it steal sports cars and drive them off the top of an office building, or jump down a warp pipe and stomp on some squids' heads

it's one of the same principal reasons people watch movies or tv - it's different than your normal routine and produces emotional responses, which is a thing humans seek out

Comment Re:AI: artificially integrated spaghettified mess (Score 1) 20

Kinda sounds like humans, really. I don't want to make a direct comparison, but the last X years of history is an entire network of adhoc - okay maybe not 'excessively complex' but it'd be weird to describe humans that way - poorly integrated collection of interconnected social/state/military systems (paperwork or otherwise) with fragmented security and accountability.

Look, yes, it's scary and dumb but the people who are like "this could be fixed if only they did A or B or listened to me" are people who view the world through a lens that is reductively simple.

All major shifts/progress/changes in technology and communication have resulted in new kinds of damage. The medium is the message indeed.

Comment Re:That's a bluff Google should NOT try. (Score 4, Insightful) 77

Yeah exactly. I think any guess as to whether AI is truly inextricable from their search product would be ill informed - I'm willing to believe it is and it isn't, but Google may get turned down (or their bluff called) by enough schools such that a sizable number of kids grow up with the muscle memory of typing in or configuring their own browsers to a different search engine.

Comment AI is just another tool (Score 3, Insightful) 147

In this context, AI is just a compiler that turns human-readable source code into machine-readable code. I mean, gcc does that too. Bison writes C code for you. IDEs help you edit. Spell checkers do your "look in the dictionary" job for you. We've had code-generating tools for a long time now, AI is just another one. Today's programmers are no longer involved in writing assembler, tomorrow's programmers will no longer be involved in writing C. How many of you can do low-level programming *now* ? How many people *today* write low quality programs with the existing tools?

What's different now is that AI disconnects you from the resulting logic in a way that previous tools didn't. Then again, C disconnects you from what the assembler does, just not as much. Python even more so. ESPHome "programs" are just YAML files. This trait enables more people to "write code", which is good, but increases the amount of bad code as much as it increases the good. We as a coding community need to figure out how to map our ideals and ethics to this new tool. What is "open source" if the compiler is an LLM instead of gcc? What is the source code? How do you reproduce or validate LLM-generated programs? Who will be providing the "core intelligence" that LLMs train on? There aren't many people who can write or maintain compilers any more, will we have the same problem with AI in the future? How do we recognize the effort, creativity, and authorship that goes in to "programming" with an LLM?

IMHO taking a general "for" or "against" position wrt AI/LLMs is not useful. We should take positions for or against *how* it's is used, and how we can "use it for good, not evil." Past generations thought computers were unobtainable magic. Today's generation has the Internet in its pocket. Future generations will wonder how we luddites survived without AI. It's up to us to figure out how to get there.

Besides, who doesn't want a compiler that reads the documentation and helps you write code? ;-)

Comment Re:A good step, but... (Score 1) 32

Sure, go far back enough (and yes, I was on computers at that time) but surely he's not saying, "Man, computers were better when you could only run one process at a time, and the operating system let you do literally anything" etc etc and if so, the answer to that is, you can still do that if you want .. you just can't do it *inside* somebody else's software architecture. You still own the hardware, do whatever you want.

Comment Re:A good step, but... (Score 1) 32

huh? it's trivial to write any code you want and run it on your phone

But with respect to your "dawn of the PC era", unless you wrote the operating system, you couldn't write and run code that could do anything and everything your computer was capable of - only code that could do what the operating system would permit you to do.

That's no different today.

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